A tale of two cushions

or maybe I should have used the title 'How me and Coco fell out this morning'.

Today is my niece's birthday and despite buying her present about a month ago, I suddenly remembered I hadn't wrapped it up until late last night.  My niece is an extremely artistic girl.  Has a degree in Art from Winchester University.  Works as an interior designer.  Presents that she gives are wrapped beautifully, with coordinating ribbons, feathers, beads and bells.  Paper and labels carefully chosen.  Clearly a roll of cheap paper from the 'Open 24 hours Tesco' was not going to be suitable.  So what does a scrapper do in this kind of situation?  She Googles 'how to make a gift box' and comes up with this:

I've never had a go at making fancy boxes before but it was good fun and pretty easy.  All I needed was a 12 x 12 piece of cardstock.  That wasn't going to be a problem was it? :-)

Then I found a piece of patterned paper with cupcakes on it, cut one out, mounted it on a piece of white card, added a gem to the centre and we were good to go.  Much more fun than popping out to Tesco late at night in the rain too!

Anyhow, the story about me and Coco involves the cushion on which I photographed the box this morning.  It's a lovely cushion covered on one side with satin, and the other side with a beautiful long heather coloured fur.  I had photographed the present before taking it round to her house and left the cushion on the bed. So I'm on the phone in the study and I can hear madam prowling around in my bedroom.  It all went quiet and I stupidly assumed she had settled herself down for a mid morning nap.  As I was finishing my call, she poked her head round the study door.  Around her mouth and all over the hair on her chin was beautiful heather coloured fluff.  As I went to investigate further, I noticed she was chewing.  Chewing beautiful heather coloured fluff.  I fished that out of her mouth {yuk} and went into the bedroom.  The cushion is laying on the floor and my bed has a fine covering of heather fluff with a few large clumps by the pillows.  Fortunately she has thinned out the fluff evenly and it's not obvious that some areas have much less than others but needless to say she is not in my good books.

Does she look sorry to you?